After several years away from the bike industry, Greg LeMond is back. The three-time Tour de France winner used the first day of the annual Interbike trade show to announce his return to making bikes with a series of commemorative designs made by Time.

The bikes themselves are, LeMond said, just the start. “I’m really excited to be back in the bike industry,” he said, adding that he has “a number of new projects next year,” including more road, cyclocross, and possibly gravel-road models.

In many ways, the biggest news was the return of LeMond himself. The LeMond Bikes brand endured struggles early in its life including a near-death experience in its first iteration. It found stability with a 15-year license to Trek and grew to be a major line, but the partnership began to go bad when LeMond first questioned whether Trek-sponsored Lance Armstrong was racing clean.

LeMond alluded to that when he said he’d waited to come back because he was “a little burned out by some battles I had in the bike industry. ” These included an acrimonious battle with Trek, which stemmed from Armstrong and LeMond’s soured relationship. In 2010, Trek announced it would cease producing the LeMond bike line, and LeMond’s presence in the bike industry was limited to a separate line of wind trainers.

Now, LeMond has revived his eponymous brand and the hyperkinetic ex-racer is clearly pouring his energy into the new venture. Time isn’t just the company making Greg’s bikes; he purchased Time Sport USA and will take over US distribution of that company’s line of frames, bikes, and components, rekindling a relationship that goes back decades to when one of Time’s founders, Jean Marc Geaugneaud, was an engineer at Look, the bike sponsor for LeMond’s la Vie Claire team.

The bikes themselves are a kind of road-race hybrid, using the existing front end of Time’s NXS model, an endurance gran fondo-style frame, with a rear triangle that emphasizes some of LeMond’s signature preferences in frame design, like a geometry that puts the rider in a long, relatively low position.

The Tour 90 is made by Time, one of the few bike makers in the world to control its carbon frame production from raw thread to finished product. (Joe Lindsey)

The three new models are limited editions and different only in cosmetics. Each honors one of LeMond’s three Tour wins (they’re called, fittingly, the Tour 86, Tour 89, and Tour 90), with graphics that recall his teams from those years, especially the Piet Mondrian-inspired La Vie Claire team of 1986.